Compiled entirely from real Russian dashboard camera videos, the movie is an experimental assemblage with no overarching plot or recurring characters. Instead, common cultural character emerges from dozens of disparate sketches. As if he were assembling a collection of Russian scary stories, the director Dmitrii Kalashnikov makes the bizarre beguiling.

Early on, a dashboard camera captures a green light as it burns across the horizon. The men who witness the light as they’re driving debate if they’ve seen a comet or a crashing plane, but on video the flash looks alien, like a probe from a foreign and hostile universe. Even when the danger turns out to be terrestrial in nature, “The Road Movie” always retains this same senseless strangeness. With every cut to a different camera, a surreal episode unfolds with a new menace. A couple drives through a forest fire so hot, the flames appear purple. When they aren’t avoiding crashes, drivers are threatened with guns, sledgehammers and hatchets. Without explanation, a man jumps on the hood of a stranger’s car, beating the glass first with his fists and then with his head.

Perhaps strangest still is that throughout the bedlam, the drivers rarely betray their shock. They are under constant siege, but the only crack in their collective stoicism is the reliance on cameras to capture the chaos. The camera offers no protection; it only provides a witness. Fortunately for audiences, it’s more pleasurable to witness anarchy than it is to experience it.

The Road Movie

Director

Dmitrii Kalashnikov

Running Time

1h 7m

Genre

Documentary

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Not rated. In Russian with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes.